


going nowhere

by thesecretdetectivecollection



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post Defenders, a teeny tiny bit of pre-romance just barely hinted at, dark matt, emo Matt, like just matt admitting that frank is attractive, very beginning of season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26208619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecretdetectivecollection/pseuds/thesecretdetectivecollection
Summary: “Hey, Red.”“I’m not him anymore,” Matt says, finally able to make out the faint sounds of Frank’s sounds, cushioned by the concrete. No helpful hardwood floors creaking to give away his location.“Murdock, then.”“I’m not him, either.” Matt sits up, gesturing at a chair.In which Matt is visited by three people from his past while recovering in the basement of Clinton Church.Inspired by Mad World by Tears for Fears.
Relationships: Frank Castle & Matt Murdock, Matt Murdock & Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock & Karen Page, Matt Murdock/Frank Castle
Comments: 8
Kudos: 90
Collections: Daredevil and Defenders Exchange 2020





	going nowhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PixelByPixel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PixelByPixel/gifts).



Matt wakes up somewhere familiar. He has no idea how he knows it’s familiar—there’s the rumble of voices, saying words he can’t make out. There’s the air he can’t smell or taste, his nose and mouth still full of the scent of smoke and the taste of blood. But his muscles aren’t instinctively tight.

_Something about this place is okay,_ he thinks, even though his brain can’t figure out what his body’s already understood. His brain is fuzzy, foggy, and he knows that if he wasn’t half-dead, he’d be able to pick up on more information, more input from the space around him.

_Foggy_ , he thinks. He holds the sound of his best friend in his mind, his voice, his laughter—but it slips. They hadn’t been that close, before the earthquake. There had been a distance between them that had started when Foggy’d found out about Daredevil. That gap between them had only widened over the course of Frank’s trial, his thing with Elektra. After she’d died, Foggy had come back, had tried to heal what Matt had broken, but it was too late. Matt pulled away as hard as he could, and eventually, even Foggy Nelson, with all his tenacity, had given up on him. Matt didn’t blame him for it. It was just self-preservation, he’d thought. He couldn’t hurt again and again, and if Matt was his best friend, that would be the rest of his life. He’d wanted better for Foggy. He’d been _happy_ , when Foggy’d finally given up on him.

That’s what he’d told himself, anyway, when he came home at night from another day at the office, scraping together enough money to pay for rent and food. That’s what he’d told himself, when he sat on the sofa, drinking a single beer before heading to bed to toss and turn. He’d ignore the screams, the gunshots, the sobs, the sounds of a city crying out for help and the silence that was all he could offer.

His brain feels like it’s wrapped in wool. He hopes vaguely that Foggy’s okay, wherever he is, and then whatever fraction of consciousness he had managed to keep hold of abandons him, and he slips into the dark, still silence.

\---  
  


He wakes to the sound of a familiar voice—a voice that had been there long before Foggy and Karen, back when he’d been a child—one of the Sisters, he thinks blearily. He pauses and makes out the harsh tone of her voice.

_Sister Maggie_ , he guesses hazily.

“Elektra?” he asks, because he doesn’t care about anything else. “Elektra,” he croaks, over and over and over again.

_She died_ , he thinks. _I went to her funeral. But the Hand brought her back_. It’s unnatural, the Church would say. Even he might say that, when he’d first felt her fight against him afterwards, none of the playfulness from when they’d spar as foreplay, none of the tenderness she showed by avoiding his softest spots. She’d still held back, of course, just enough to not kill him, but he had read her confusion—even she hadn’t known why.

The way they brought her back was unnatural, yes. But Matt had thanked God when he’d heard her voice, when he’d smelled her scent, underneath a new earthiness she must have acquired during the transformation. He’d felt her lips on his, at the end there, and she’d come back to him.

Surely God wouldn’t be so cruel as to take her a second time?

“Matthew,” says a gentle voice. It’s a man’s voice, quiet, edged with concern. “Elektra’s dead. We buried her.”

The _we_ is what gives it away. Father Lantom, sitting at his bedside, telling him something he remembers far too well and acting as if he’s somehow forgotten the months of loneliness, the emptiness in his bed and in his head, the nightly agony of hearing the city cry for him and knowing he’d promised Foggy that he would stand back and just let it scream.

“Where is she?” he repeats.

“Matthew,” Lantom says gently, “Elektra is dead.”

“No,” Matt wants to explain the whole thing, but his head is swimming, and there are waves in his ear, as if he’s got fluid stuck in there, a whole ocean pressing against his eardrum. He wants to explain, but the story is long, and Lantom, true believer that he is, won’t accept it anyway.

_God isn’t cruel,_ Matt thinks. _He just doesn’t give a shit_.

Matt can relate. He doesn’t give a shit, either.

\---  
  


He’s never been a good patient. On some level, he knows he’s being an asshole, sharing his pessimism with orphaned children who still have some hope left for this callous, unkind world. He knows he’s being a dick, talking back to Sister Maggie. But she deserves it—it’s not like _she’s_ kind to _him_ , or if she is, it’s buried under layers upon layers of sarcasm, and Matt doesn’t have the energy to dig down to the subtext.

Sister Maggie asks him a few times if he has any friends she can call—she wants to get rid of him, and Matt, spitefully, refuses to let her off the hook. He doesn’t have any words for Foggy and Karen. He can’t fathom having to speak to them now, when he doesn’t even known how to speak to himself anymore. The world has shifted on its axis. His foundation—his religious beliefs, his supersenses, his sense of responsibility, his identity as a lawyer and as Daredevil—it’s all been stripped away, and this husk is all that’s left. That’s how he thinks of his body now—just a husk. It had been a tool, once. He’d made love to Elektra with this body, he’d kissed Karen with this body, he’d stood tall and strong in courtrooms and rooftops in this body and fought for justice. Now it just lays in bed, worthless and useless. He needs help just to get to the bathroom at first, and when he manages, it’s not healing so much as pure goddamn _stubbornness_ that gets him there.

The days pass—or at least, he sleeps and wakes and eats and shits. The window doesn’t cast light on him very much, so it’s difficult to recognize time other than through the watery sound of footsteps in the corridor—the children, moving quickly, like there’s somewhere they need to be, something they need to do, so different from the slow, measured step of the sisters.

Eventually, he gets well enough that Maggie gets to toss him out of the infirmary and into the basement of the church. He thinks the basement of a church might be purgatory for someone who’s as agnostic as he’s finding himself to be these days. God might be there, he might not be, but even if He is, He sure hasn’t shown any goddamn interest in Matt’s life, or this city. Not ever, in the entirety of the world, as far as Matt can tell.

He lays on the cot in the basement, unable to muster the energy or the interest to map out the space that he’s basically going to be squatting in for the foreseeable future.

He lets his eyes close.

\---  
  


He wakes to Foggy’s voice.

“Christ, I didn’t—Father, why didn’t you call me sooner?”

Right. Matt hadn’t thought to forbid Lantom from telling them, and it’s not like he’d invoked the seal of confession.

So of course, Lantom had found a loophole and exploited it to do what he thought was best.

How very lawyerlike for a priest.

Matt lays still, hoping to feign sleep, but something must give him away, because Sister Maggie—who is apparently also there, too quiet for him to hear on his bad side—sells him out.

“Good morning, Matthew,” she says piously, and he knows that it’s just a front, that she’s smug, to see him go through something he doesn’t want to go through, to get him back for being such a nuisance this whole time.

“Morning, Sister,” he responds, because not to respond would be tantamount to admitting he wasn’t really sleeping.

“Matt.” Foggy’s voice is so _full_ —in it, Matt can hear pain, joy, a sort of overwhelmed yearning, as if he’s convinced that this is a dream that he’s going to wake up from any minute. Matt wonders how long he’s been out, that Foggy’s reacting like this.

“Hey, Fogs.” His voice cracks, dry the way it always is first thing in the morning, but it probably sounds worse when combined with the visible bandages, because Foggy rushes past Maggie to put a glass under the tap and fill it with water.

“So,” he says, handing the glass to Matt, making sure his fingers are wrapped securely around it before he lets go, “you’re not dead.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Matt responds, trying to crack a smile.

“I don’t even know if I can take my own word for it.” He sounds bewildered, more than anything else. His world doesn’t make sense, not when Matt was dead and now he’s not.

Matt knows the feeling.

_“This is what living feels like,” Elektra had whispered to him, and her lips descended onto his, just as the rubble started falling. He’d spared a single thought to the others, to hope that they made it out, to be glad that they had detonated the explosives they’d planted._

_After that, he’d just thought about her, and how glad he was that he was down there with her. This time,_ he’d thought _, this time I’ll stop anyone who tries to hurt her. This time, once we die, I won’t let her come back again._

One of the last thoughts he’d had before he’d fallen was _I can’t wait to see what she looks like._

But that had been stupid. He’d been _stupid_ , to think that he could have an ending, that he could rest, that the sight he’d lost decades ago might be restored to him in the kingdom of heaven.

There is no kingdom of heaven, he thinks. God doesn’t care how we suffer. If He did, He’d help.

“Buddy, how’re you feeling?”

Foggy’s voice drags him back into the present, and he resents it. He’s comfortable in his own head, or perhaps less _un_ comfortable there. He’s least unhappy in his own thoughts. Such a pity nobody lets him enjoy them when they’re good, and nobody bothers rescuing him from them when they’re bad.

“I’m fine.” The lie feels more blatant than it usually does, and when he smiles to try to reinforce the words, he feels the keen absence of sound. This is where he would listen to Foggy’s heartbeat, hear annoyance or frustration at the ritual denial of his own pain, a fondness at how little he’s changed.

He hears nothing. Lantom and Maggie don’t say anything either. Maybe they left.

Foggy sighs. “You’re definitely Matt,” he says, as if there was any doubt, “nobody else would try that shit on me while recovering in the basement of a church from life-threatening injuries.”

“There’s nothing I can do,” Matt admits. He hopes that Lantom and Maggie are gone. He can only say this to Foggy. Only Foggy’s earned this much honesty from him. “It’s all _gone_ , Fogs. All of it. Smell, taste, most of my hearing. And sight hasn’t come back. It’s just—it’s over.”

Some bitter part of him wants to accuse Foggy of being happy—that’s what he’s wanted this whole time, isn’t it? For Matt to stop being Daredevil. Well, he isn’t going to be him anymore. Even with the protection offered by the suit, he wouldn’t last an hour in his current condition.

Foggy takes his hand. How typical of him, to find the one thing that Matt hasn’t lost and use that to ground him. It feels like it’s been a long time since he’s been touched like this—a friendly touch, a comforting touch. He hadn’t considered himself touch-starved, but maybe the type of contact mattered. Maybe only having clinical touch wasn’t much better than complete lack of contact.

“You don’t know that,” Foggy says softly, “you might get better.”

Matt snorts. “Yeah, and maybe I’ll get my vision back, too. I know what you’re trying to do, give me hope, but that’s actually worse. I’m tired of having hope and then losing it. I’m just—I’m just tired, Fogs.”

_Yeah, me too_ , Foggy’s going to say. That’s what he always says— _“you’ve never known pain like this, Matt—I went dancing last night.”_ Or _“I don’t think anyone’s ever been this tired before—that case was a real doozy, huh?”_

But it’s quiet. Foggy’s not saying it. They’re not acting like it’s all normal.

He just sighs. Wow, Matt thinks, a sigh, less than an hour after finding out that his dead formerly estranged best friend is still alive. That must be some kind of record.

“I’ve got to get to work,” he says finally.

Gone are the days where Foggy will skip work for him. Gone are the days where he’ll run around the rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen to find his unconscious body. Gone are the days of avocados of law.

Matt nods. “I’ll be here,” he says wryly.

There’s silence, and Matt is forced to assume that Foggy’s nodding—he never used to nod, but maybe he’s gotten out of the habit of humming now that everyone in his life can see him. Or maybe he thinks Matt’s still got his supersenses.

Maybe he doesn’t know that Matt’s got a full one and a half of the normal five senses functioning at the minute.

“Take care of yourself, Matt.” The words are perfunctory, said for the sake of saying them, or for the sake of having Sister Maggie hear them, because there’s also resignation in his voice, as if he knows that Matt can’t be trusted to take care of himself.

“Sure,” Matt says, trying on a smile and feeling how awkwardly it sits on his face. “See you later.”

Foggy doesn’t know what else to say after that, and Matt makes out the sound of footsteps receding.

Before Daredevil, they’d never had this awkwardness between them. Even after, in the brief period of time during which Foggy had known and Matt had torpedoed their firm, their relationship was always comfortable. Foggy Nelson knew him better than any other person on the planet.

Now they don’t know each other anymore.

It’s not until after that Matt thinks to ask if Foggy’s still at HCB, if he’s enjoying his work there, what kinds of cases he handles on a day-to-day basis. Small talk, something that normal people with a normal friendship wouldn’t struggle with so much.

\---  
  


Karen’s the next to show up. It’s even harder to read her than it is to read Foggy. Matt knows Foggy—or he did, once. He’s got more information to work with in terms of drawing inferences. He knows how Foggy reacts to good news and bad, knows that Foggy still cares about him, even through the Daredevil and the undead ninjas and the fiasco of the Frank Castle trial.

Karen’s different. What they had feels less substantial in some ways than what they could have had. From the very beginning, Matt had sensed her attraction to him, had recognized that he reciprocated that attraction. She’d been—but that was the problem, wasn’t it? She _hadn’t_ been the escape from his life that he’d hoped for. She hadn’t been the white picket fence. They’d never have the kind of dream that Matt used to hold onto, when he dragged himself bloody and bruised through an open window and into an empty bed. They’d never get to come home after a long day at the office, make dinner, have sex, get married, or have kids.

She walks into the basement with the confident click of heels. She’s slow to speak, and at first, Matt wonders if maybe it isn’t Karen, after all. Maybe it’s Claire, come back from Harlem. Or maybe… well, if Matt made it out, what’s to say that _she_ couldn’t have made it out, too?

“Foggy told me you were here.” There’s an edge to her voice—she’s angry at him, he realizes. No surprise there, he supposes. It seems she’s been angry with him ever since she found out who he really was.

“Hi, Karen. How are you?” The niceties he’d skipped over with Foggy seem awkward and out of place now. What a stupid question for him to ask, when he’s convalescing in a church basement and she walked in on her own two feet, hearing and seeing and smelling and tasting everything around her.

“I’m fine,” she says—he can hear the forced smile in her voice. “I’m, uh, still at the _Bulletin_. I saw Frank, not too long ago, so that was… an adventure.”

“Yeah?” She’s offered him an out—he doesn’t hesitate to take it. “How so?”

She hesitates, probably thinking of the arguments they’d had over Frank’s methods and how they were different from Daredevil’s, whether it was a difference of kind or simply of degree.

“He’s, uh, he’s still Frank,” she says vaguely.

He can read between the lines as well as he ever could. “So he still violently murders people.”

“Bad people,” she corrects, though she doesn’t deny it.

She’d always been a little obsessed with the person she thought Frank could be, after she fixed him, convinced him to have a moral awakening and stop killing.

Just like that, they’re back at a stalemate, only now it’s Matt’s turn to offer a topic of conversation.

He wishes she would just leave. He wishes Foggy had never told her he was still alive.

He wishes Lantom had never told Foggy in the first place.

This life is different from the life in which they knew him. In this life, he has no energy to keep up with social conventions, or to ask about work, or to offer up platitudes about how he’ll be up and at it before you know it. He doesn’t have it in him to smile and act like he’s the same man he was before he died.

In a way, this is his fourth life. His first, a happy, colorful childhood. His second, a child in a sea of darkness, with his father as his anchor. His third, navigating a familiar world in unfamiliar ways, adrift until he met Stick and started fighting, planting the seeds of Daredevil at the tender age of ten.

And now, here he is. Twenty-nine years old. His new life is dark and bare, cool against the skin of his feet, empty of scent or taste, every movement cloaked in pain.

What can he offer Karen now? What could he _ever_ have offered her? A life, a family, a forever? He’d been deluding himself.

It’s clear now that there’s little point to this. It’s also clear that Karen is here out of guilt, as much as interest or compassion. Maybe she thinks if she’d gotten back together with him, he wouldn’t have gone into that building. Maybe she thinks if they’d been more honest with each other, he would have come out of that building instead of choosing to remain behind.

He wonders if Danny told her that it had been his own choice to stay down, that he’d never intended to come up, that it was a deliberate decision masquerading as a sacrifice.

“I’m sure you’ve got a lot of work to do, Karen.” Prolonging a painful and unproductive conversation feels like the wrong move. Better to give her a way out, to hand her a rope to pull herself out of the black hole Matt’s becoming.

“No,” she says instantly, “work can wait, we thought you were _dead_ —” But by the end of the sentence, her words have lost their conviction, and she sounds more uncertain than anything else.

“What happened to me wasn’t your fault. Or Foggy’s. It had nothing to do with you,” Matt says bluntly. It sounds harsher than he intended for it to. It sounds like _I wouldn’t have done anything differently if we were together. I still would have chosen death with Elektra over life with you._

That’s not what he means for it to sound like, but it is true. With Karen, his aspirations were far-fetched—dreams meant for somebody else, somebody who might actually live to the age of forty, someone who didn’t have a will drawn up and certified the day after he first went out as Daredevil.

With Elektra, it had been real. Real adrenaline rushes, real passion, real conversations with each other in the dark, warm skin against cool silk sheets.

It hadn’t been healthy—the furthest thing from it—and it hadn’t been honest, but under the lies and the violence and the blood, they had had something real, and that had to mean something, even in this mad world where people have to make their own meaning.

He expects her to get up and leave. He expects her to be hurt, to protest, to be offended, maybe, at the suggestion that she’s self-centered enough to believe everything is about her.

“That’s what Frank said,” she says instead, a little wistful.

Matt’s surprised, both at her words and his own ability to feel surprise at all.

“You talked to Frank about me?”

Quiet for a moment. Matt focuses and strains to hear the rustling of cloth—is she shrugging? Fidgeting? Does she want to avoid the question?

“Karen?” he asks, to nudge her into a response. She might be uncomfortable, but so is he, at the thought that Frank Castle might think he has carte blanche to do what Matt used to do in Hell’s Kitchen, only better, more effectively, more permanently.

_You hit ‘em, they get back up. I hit ‘em, they stay down._

“He asked.” She leaves it at that, defensive. _I didn’t bring it up,_ she wants to point out. _You didn’t rule my life when you were alive, and you sure as hell didn’t after you died._

Another surprise. Frank had always seemed to be irritated by him. It wasn’t pure hatred, like it was for the Irish or the Dogs of Hell. It was disgust, and disappointment. Matt had recognized it instantly—Frank had seen something in him, some capability, and he’d thought that Matt wasn’t living up to his potential.

Thinking about it had sent Matt back to his childhood, a crumpled bracelet made out of an ice cream wrapper.

He realizes suddenly that he’s been quiet too long—that’s been happening a lot lately. He gets caught up in his own thoughts, his own memories, and forgets about the conversation that’s unfolding in front of him.

“I thought he left New York.” Anything to fill the silence. He never really doubted that Frank would be back. He played it off, acted like a tough guy, a boat with no anchor, drifting across the open ocean, but he was a New Yorker. It was in his bones, same as it was for Matt.

Matt had never left, and he fully expects he’ll die without having so much as step foot in Jersey. Frank’s left time and time again, but something always draws him back in. Hell’s Kitchen had a way of doing that, pulling people back when they thought they couldn’t be tied down, not realizing they’d been hooked long ago.

“He did, but he came back, said he had unfinished business. Might be gone again now. You never really know with Frank.”

Matt nods, because if there’s one thing he knows, it’s that he both knows Frank and doesn’t. He knows him perhaps better than anyone else—certainly better than Karen, who he can tell is still working on letting go of the hope that she can fix him, rehabilitate him, like a feral dog. And yet, he finds himself caught off guard by Frank’s humanity, when he sees evidence of it.

The silence goes on for longer this time, and Matt hears the rustling again. He wonders what time it is—the sun is shining through the windows and warming his skin, so it must be near noon. She came here on her lunch break.

“You should, uh, grab something to eat,” he says finally, “you need food to keep being the best journalist in town.” He tries to imbue his voice with enthusiasm, and he hopes it goes over better than it sounded, because he sounds about as sincere as a sorority girl being fake-nice to a rival.

Karen agrees, and promises to come back again. She thinks it’s a responsibility—he can hear it in her voice. She’s not coming back because she wants to, she’s coming back because she thinks it’s her duty to come and talk to him, to make him feel better, so he can reemerge from this crypt someday, re-enter the world.

\---  
  


“Hey, Red.”

Matt had been sleeping, and that in itself is a sign of how far he’s slipped. He can hardly remember the last time anyone had snuck up on him.

( _Lie_ , his heart whispers, remembering coming back from his date with Karen and smelling Elektra’s scent in the air. His heart racing, wondering if it was an olfactory hallucination, only to feel the scent thicken in the air, warm and full as it never was in his dreams.)

“I’m not him anymore,” Matt says, finally able to make out the faint sounds of Frank’s sounds, cushioned by the concrete. No helpful hardwood floors creaking to give away his location.

“Murdock, then.”

It’s the first time that they’ve acknowledged it. Matt suspected, that night on the roof with Elektra. He’d lost his cowl in the fight, and Frank had a sniper rifle and scope. He must have taken a look. He would’ve seen, even if he hadn’t meant to, even if it was just to make sure that nobody was sneaking up on Matt.

“I’m not him, either.” Matt sits up, gesturing at a chair.

There’s a creak from the wooden chair next to his bed, and it’s reassuring, to know where Frank is in the space.

“Daredevil. The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, whatever.”

Matt barks a laugh. “Devil’s _dead_ , Frank, haven’t you heard?”

“So who the fuck are you, then?” He’s leaning in closer, and Matt can feel the warmth radiating from his body against the skin of his hand.

“Me? I’m nobody. Just a dead man walking… on my good days.”

Frank sits, weighs his words, and then scoffs.

“Bullshit, man. You’re still Red.”

“The suit’s gone.” It feels like an admission of some kind.

“And good riddance. Your cutesy footie pajamas weren’t as intimidating as you thought they were. Especially not with the ears.”

He thinks about Jess, for a moment.

“They’re horns,” he says. He wonders if she knows he’s alive. She’s the best PI in the city when she’s sober, and still top five when she’s drunk off her ass, so he figures she probably does.

“Whatever, man. So you gonna hide in a church forever? That’s your plan?” It sounds like Frank’s judging him. Matt fights down some irritation. But under the annoyance, there’s a hint of relief. Here’s someone who isn’t handling him with kid gloves, who doesn’t let him mope.

Here’s someone who expects more from him.

“What would you suggest I do instead?” Matt means for it to come out bitter and sarcastic, but instead it comes out horribly sincere.

“Can you stand?”

Matt nods and does. He hears footsteps, feels Frank’s presence stop a few feet in front of him.

Frank reaches out, lays a hand on Matt’s shoulder, follows it down to find Matt’s hand and lay it on his shoulder.

Matt has an image of a middle-school dance, leaving room for Jesus, and he has to swallow back the surge of manic laughter that crawls up his throat.

“You got me?” Frank asks, voice a little low.

It’s been a long time since Matt’s been attracted to anyone, but that voice makes something in his gut squirm happily.

“Uh, yeah. I guess?” Matt’s acutely aware that standing up with his hands on Frank Castle’s shoulders in the middle of the night will be a hell of a thing to have to explain to Sister Maggie, should she come down with a nightcap to check on him.

“Hit me.”

“Huh?” _Oh, very smooth. That’s what a Columbia education gets you_ , he thinks to himself, _huh_.

“Throw a punch. Hit me, Murdock, I know you want to.”

“Matt Murdock is dead.” Sometimes Matt wonders if he was ever really alive.

“Yeah? Because that sounds like the sort of fucking technicality only a lawyer would point out.”

Matt has to bite back a smile. It’s true, after all. It is the sort of technicality he would’ve pointed out in a courtroom. He would’ve used it to spin some sort of narrative, have the jury eating out of his hands, and then—

But those days are over, now.

“Fuck you, Frank.”

“Gotta ask me nicely, Red,” Frank replies without so much as skipping a beat. “And your chances would be better if we weren’t in a goddamn church.”

Matt smiles again, glad of the darkness.

“So. You ready to hit me?”

“Keep talking and I will be.”

Frank huffs out a little laugh. “You’re a little shit, aren’t you,” he mutters, but the words are softened by the tone of his voice.

Besides, even Matt knows that yes, he is kind of a little shit sometimes.

He doesn’t bother responding, just shifts his feet slightly. He closes his eyes out of habit, assesses his body. His back and hip might tolerate a boxer’s stance, but he won’t be able to pivot into the punch, won’t be able to generate force from his whole body that way.

All he can do is shift his right foot back slightly and put his fists up.

He wonders if Frank will hit him back. Bizarrely, he finds himself hoping that he does.

He clenches his right fist. His hand feels right, like this. He pulls it back and trusts in his shoulder to land a blow to Frank’s chest.

Frank lets out a little grunt—has he actually generated that much force, or is Frank just humoring him, trying to rebuild his confidence?

Frank doesn’t hit back, but he does put his hands up in front of his chest, like pads.

Matt gets it, lets himself hit at the palms of Frank’s hands—left, right, left, right.

Jab, cross, jab, cross.

He feels himself getting more comfortable, putting more force into the blows. Maybe—maybe—

Pain explodes across his lower back.

He lets out an inadvertent gasp and stumbles back.

Frank’s there, catching him so he doesn’t bump into the frame of the cot and add a bruise to his already sore back.

“Fuck,” Matt whispers, “fuck, fuck, _fuck_ , God- _fucking_ -dammit—”

It feels like he hasn’t been allowed this before. As much as he believes, or doesn’t, he hasn’t cursed like this since he arrived at the church, and it feels good.

It feels _good_ , to blaspheme in the house of the Lord, to curse Him, to repudiate Him, when He has failed Matt so many times.

He keeps saying it, keeps whispering obscenities, even as he feels mucus in his nose and throat, thickening his voice. He keeps saying it, even as he feels tears dripping down his cheeks, onto the fabric of his sweatpants.

Frank doesn’t say anything, but he stays there, the firm warmth of his thigh pressed against Matt’s from where they’re sitting side by side on the cot.

He stands eventually, mumbling something about how Matt should get some rest.

Matt waits for the sound of footsteps receding, but instead he’s gifted with the creaking of the wooden chair, as Frank settles in.

“You’re not leaving?” He blurts out.

“Do you want me to?”

When he first met Frank, he would have said yes. He would have refused any help, would have refused anything from a man who had so much blood on his hands.

But the man he was then is dead, after all.

“No,” he admits.

Frank settles back in the chair, and Matt lets his eyes close.

\---  
  


When he wakes in the morning, Frank’s gone. It must have been a dream.

There are dried tears tracks on his cheeks, salty and itchy, but that’s nothing new.

He’s sore, but that’s not new, either.

But there is something that is.

A makeshift punching bag hung from a beam, stuffed with clothes from the donation boxes and old nun’s habits bundled into a thick canvas laundry bag.

**Author's Note:**

> This is late, and for that I am sorry. But I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> I drew fairly loosely upon the lyrics, so I hope it fits with the prompt you envisioned.
> 
> I might write a sequel to this if I have any more ideas and it doesn't turn into the fic that I'm already writing for the same period of time.
> 
> Let me know what you think, and any suggestions for alternate titles are welcome... I'm just shit at titles, you guys.


End file.
